Zeusel was no longer to be restrained; he has broken through and has the Princess by the wing--the whole joke of this play, I mean the whole serious meaning of it, is now once for all spoiled. This gray fool has in his old days--his nights are still older--buttoned himself into a complete historical copper-plate, that is to say, into a zoölogical fashionable waistcoat, wherein, with his four variegated rings, too, he looks for all the world like a green game-wagon, on which the animal pieces of the whole chase are painted, and four rings for the ringing of the swine's snouts are there _in naturâ_.[129] I must now see and suffer it,--as he does everything in the past,--while he, fuddled with vanity and hardly able to distinguish watch-chains from gala-coats, runs up and catches at some silken stuff to kiss it. It was easy to foresee that the man would spoil my whole altar-piece with his historical figure; I would absolutely have suppressed the ninny and covered him up behind the frame of the picture, had he not with his flappers and skippers stood out too prominently and made too much of a chattering; and then, too, my correspondent has expressly introduced and designated him among the benefit-confederates. It hardly pays for the trouble to write-- Act Fifth; since all is now thrown into pickle and the reading world is in a grin. In the Fifth Act, which I make without any gusto, there still continued to be nothing done,--whereas Tragedy-makers and Christians turn over the conversion and all important matter into the last Act, as, according to Bacon, a courtier thrust his petitions into the Postscript,--nothing, I say, except that the Princess let her new maids of honor do their first example in arithmetic and subtraction; namely, the problem of disrobing.... And as undressing concludes the fifth Acts of Tragedies, where Death does it,--and of Comedies, where Love does it,--so, too, would this Benefit-Comedy, which, like our life, wavers between Comedy and Tragedy, wearily end with an undressing. _End of the Benefit-Comedy_. I was too much excited yesterday. To be sure the Apothecary is the Dog and Cat, in my picture, biting each other under the table of the Holy Supper; but, upon the whole, the very farce is sublime. Let one just consider that all is carried on in a monarchical form of government, which, according to Beattie, more than the republican form, helps out the comic,--that, according to Addison and Sulzer, precisely the most waggish men are the gravest, and that, consequently, the same thing must hold in regard to the stuff they work;--one must then see at once, from the comic element which my Acts contain, that they are serious....